The latest Europa Universalis IV dev diary goes into the scoring system and Japan. Nice to see them admit the previous system for Japan they introduced in A Divine Wind wasn't working well. I do like Paradox obviously spending time trying to add flavour and character into certain nations in Europa Universalis IV through national ideas, events and the like. However the big news here is the scoring system. Which is overhauled to let the little ones have a chance at winning as well. Boom or bust?

Over the last decade, we’ve often been asked about how our games have “winners”. We firmly believe that most of our players are happy to just enjoy the sandbox, but if we want to push them to excel and to take on new challenges, it sometimes helps to give them a metric to use. What is the incentive to attack another strong nation if you can decide for yourself that you are “winning” without that?

And some of our games do have pretty defined goals that establish why opposing other players is a good idea, like Hearts of Iron, where the object is winning a great war, or Sengoku, where you need to become the Shogun. Others, like Crusader Kings and Victoria, have ways to compare your performance in one game with how you did in another.

Europa Universalis has always been rather more open ended, and this poses a different challenge to us as designers since it means looking at a game we know well in new ways.

The way we have solved this is a scoring system. The higher the score you have, the better you have performed, and in a multiplayer game, the top scorer is the clear winner (though we expect debates about who was the most duplicitous ally to continue).

So how does the scoring work? This is again where our division of the game into Administrative, Diplomatic and Military components comes in handy. Every month you get points, depending on your rank in these three different fields. The top 10 nations in each field earns points, with the number of points dependant on your rank in each category. You can never lose your score - your points will not go down and there are no penalties for falling behind - but if you are outside the top ten, you get zero points that month.

You diplomatic rank is derived from your fleet size, the number of subject nations you have (vassals and personal unions), strong countries you have allied with, your diplomatic technology level and your merchant power.

Your military rank depends on the size of your armies, your total manpower, the number of leaders you have, your military technology level and the quality of your troops.

As you can see, there are ways to block a powerful country from accumulating points if lesser countries get together.​